12. Internationale Schillertage (review)

The Internationale Schillertage has been performed biannually since 1979 in Mannheim and Weimar, the sites of Friedrich Schiller's own greatest triumphs. The festival has proved, if nothing else, that Schiller is alive and still outliving and challenging all the bad press he has received over the past two hundred years. As one of a very select group of playwrights who have entire festivals devoted to them, Schiller offers the promise of potent engaging theatre, notwithstanding the devastating judgments of playwrights such as Georg Büchner, who called Schiller's characters "marionettes with blue noses," and Friedrich Nietzsche, who called Schiller a "moral trumpeter."

The key to successful Schiller performances has always been finding a solution to his concept of pathos—his penchant for castinghistorical and political ideas in overt emotional gestures, heightening his characters' ferocious idealism, and championing their unfettered pursuit of self-realization. This year's Schillertage devoted much discussion to Schiller's pathos, drawing prominent politicians, theatre scholars, lawyers, athletes, and philosophers to debate the contemporary significance of his peculiar blend of idealism and emotionalism.

From approximately 150 entrants, the organizers of the 2003 Schillertage selected sixteen productions for the Mannheim festival: a mainstage series of ten and an experimental series of six. The mainstage series featured multiple productions of Schiller's early plays The Robbers (in addition to a production of Verdi's opera), Intrigue and Love, The Parasite (Schiller's dramaturgical workshop translation of a play by Louis-Benoît Picard), along with Schiller's late plays William Tell and The Maid of Orleans.

The Robbers—the play that ignited Schiller's career in its famous 1782 premiere at the Nationaltheater Mannheim—is also a good example of how a play with strong political resonances and emotional impact may deteriorate into melodrama. At its center are Karl Moor, who leaves home to pursue justice with a band of outlaws, and his brother Franz, who stays at his father's palace to plan an intrigue against his sibling. The play, originally regarded as a blunt critique of social conventions of eighteenth-century German courts, also expresses Schiller's aversion to the notion that good ends justify violent means.

The Nationaltheater Mannheim offered a highly conceptualized, cerebral solution to Schiller's pathos in its Robbers production. Director K. D. Schmid interpreted the outlaws' violence in the name of freedom only as a private, spontaneous aggression, a compensation for personal disappointments unmotivated by any solid political program. To portray the revolutionary Karl, Schmid looked to the egomania, vulnerability, and musical brutality of the singer Eminem. Schmid and his set designer settled on an abstract space in which to stage the director's idea of individual isolation and preoccupation with self-reflection. The set was enclosed in a vast mirror-lined triangular space with the apex running upstage, its unbroken walls offering no escape or relief from self-examination. The characters were dressed in jeans and modern T-shirts, one emblazoned with the words "don't disturb me." This design allowed for few exciting staging configurations: the robbers spent much of the performance moving toward their own images, in a dynamic that quickly became predictable and monotonous. However, the conflation of the play's locations into one abstract space helped the director to avoid the common melodramatic scheme of the good brother and bad brother, and to emphasize instead the brutality of both men against one other.

The Schillertage offered three quite different productions of Schiller's Intrigue and Love. This play, originally produced in Mannheim in 1784, presents a political context similar to The Robbers. The drama centers on a pair of lovers from different social backgrounds, the bourgeoise Louise Miller and the aristocrat Ferdinand, who, recognizing the obstacles to the couple's love, ultimately serves Louise a poisonous potion before killing himself. Performances of Intrigue and Love usually fall into one of two categories: one emphasizing the play's social-class conflicts, and the other treating the play as a...